História da Grécia Antiga #16 com Donald Kagan, de Yale

I was trying to describe to you how the Athenian democracy in its full form after the reforms that were instituted by Pericles after the death of Ephialtes how that system worked and I described the what we would call the legislative branch and the much less significant executive branch and now I'd like to turn to what we would call the judicial branch now this Athenian judicial system I think might seem even more strange to The modern I than the rest of the Constitution you start with this panel of 6000 jurors who enlisted to serve in the

courts each year on any given day the jurors who showed up to accept an assignment or assigned to specific courts and to specific cases the usual size of a jury seems to have been 501 although there were juries of from a small as 51 to as many as fifteen hundred and one depending on what the case was whether it was public or Private and also how important it was to avoid any possibility of bribery or partiality the Athenians evolved an astonishingly complicated system of assignments that effectively prevented tampering that system is described in Aristotle's constitution

of Athens I think it's chapter 61 if any of you think that you have about a month or two to spare read that paragraph and tell me what the hell it means how it works is so complicated and the point is that They wanted to be sure that it was just impossible for anybody to know who was going to be on a particular jury panel for a particular case so that if you wanted to bribe anybody you'd have to bribe 6,000 people and that might be mildly discouraging you might say that's that's an honest bunch

of people boy well you don't devise such a complicated system if everybody isn't busily thinking of a way to cheat it seems to me however they would have failed the System certainly was foolproof I think legal procedure was remarkably different from what takes place in a modern American Court the first surprise you would meet is the absence of any public prosecutor or state's attorney in fact there are no lawyers at all think of that think of how happy that would make Shakespeare complaints whether they was civil or criminal public or private large or small were

registered and argued by private citizens plaintiff and Defendant sewer and sue each made his case in his own voice if not in his own language because anyone was free to hire a speechwriter to help him prepare his case and that profession flourished in Athens although it reached its peak only many years after the days of Pericles the greatest writers of courtroom speeches that have been preserved and I believe they were preserved because generations thought they were the very best speeches there were come from the Next century from the 4th century BC here's another surprise there

is no judge the jury was everything no self-respecting Athenian Democrat would allow some individual whatever his qualifications to tell him what was relevant evidence and what was not or which laws or which precedents apply from the Athenian point of view that would give too much weight to learning and to expertise and it would also create the danger of corruption and Undemocratic prejudice I mean if the judge you you couldn't conceit conceal who the judge was going to be as well as you could the jurors and so you could if he if there was a judge

and he was important you might be able to bribe him indeed in our own system it is not unheard of that judges are bribed it's not even unheard of that they were unduly prejudiced in one direction or another the Athenians would have none of that so it was up to the contestants in The case to cite the relevant laws and precedents and it was up to the jurors to decide between the plaintiff and the defendant so in fundamental matters of justice and fairness the Athenian Democrat put very little faith in experts this was one of

the most democratic aspects of this democratic constitution the assumption that all citizens had enough sense and enough of whatever else it took to make the judgments that were so important in the Courts in the courtroom the plaintiff and defendant each had an opportunity to present his case also to rebut his opponent to cite what was thought to be the relevant law to produce witnesses and then to sum up his case each now here's another amazing thing from an American perspective each case I'm sorry each phase in the case was limited to a specific amount of

time which was kept by an official using a water clock and no trial get this lasted more than a Single day finally the case went to the jury which of course received no charge or instruction since there was no judge to tell them what they had to think about and what possibilities were available the jury did not deliberate you didn't have 50 in one fifteen hundred and one angry men they just voted by secret ballot and a simple majority decided the issue if a penalty was called for and it was not one that was described

by law and very Few penalties were described by law the following procedure was used the plaintiff who had won the case proposed a penalty the defendant then had the opportunity to propose a different penalty the jury then again no deliberation just voted to choose one or the other but they could not propose anything of their own no creative penalties were possible just one or the other of the ones proposed by each side normally this process led both sides if You think about it to suggest moderate penalties for the jury would be put off by an

unreasonable suggestion one way or another if the plaintiff asked for too heavy a penalty that would guarantee they would take the other guys penalty and vice versa critics of this system complained that democracy made the Athenians litigious the system contained a device therefore well not therefore but as a matter of fact and contradiction to that point no time let Me back up of course Athenians were litigious and knowing that they built in an element meant to reduce the degree of unfounded unreasonable silly or just terrible accusations the system contained this device if the plaintiff did

not win a stated percentage of the jurors votes then he was required to pay a considerable fine in public prosecutions he paid it to the state in private prosecutions he paid it to the defendant And surely this must have served as a significant deterrent for frivolous malevolent and merely adventurous suits just think of how it would change our system if we had something like that if in a way we do we do have a lot some of it available in our own system it is possible for instance if somebody brings a suit against somebody else

and fails it is possible for the judge to decide that the defeated side must pay court costs which is a form of defense against The frivolous charges but it would it wasn't it isn't anything as thorough as the Athenian system which always had that around so if you had a case that wasn't going to win many friends on the jury it was going to cost you one way or another well this Athenian system of justice had many flaws obviously decisions could be quirky and unpredictable since they were unchecked by precedent juries could be prejudiced and

the jurors had no defense except Their own intelligence and knowledge against speakers who cited laws incorrectly and who distorted history and we have speeches of in law courts in which these guys are making up laws that nobody ever heard of and that they are making arguments that are terrible so that they did abuse this opportunity there's no question about it speech is unhampered by rules of evidence and relevance and without the discipline imposed by judges could be fanciful False and sophistical there's one anecdote that is handed down about a famous athenian or occurred that i

think gives you some clue about this this was lysias who lived at the end of the 5th century and into the fourth and he was one of the great successful speech writers in Athens well somebody came to him and said I'm involved in this lawsuit Lysias and I'd like to pay you for writing a speech on my side and was his head fine He went home he wrote the speech he brought it to the man and said here it is the guy reddit he said Lizzie this is terrific great speech I can't lose thanks a

million this just goes home to the while later this is his a banging on his door it's the same guy he said Lysias I read that speech again was I wrong it's filled with terrible arguments contradictions if there are holes in your logic that they can run trucks through and listen says calm down My friend the jury will only hear the speech once so of course all of these flaws were there yet from a modern perspective I would argue that the Athenian system had a number of attractions the American legal system and court procedures have

been blamed for excessive technicality verging on incomprehensible T and for the central role of lawyers and judges which give an enormous advantage to the rich who can afford to pay the burgeoning costs of Participating in the legal system the absence typically of a sufficient deterrent to unfounded lawsuits has helped to crowd court calendars time spent in jury selection which didn't take any time at all of course in Athens and wrangling over legal technicalities stretches out still further a process that has no time limit it is not uncommon for participants in a lawsuit to wait for

many years before coming to trial sometimes the plaintiff has died Before his case gets to court not everyone is convinced that the gain in this group protection of the participants rights in an increasingly complex code of legal procedure is worth the resulting delay and some point to the principle that justice delayed is justice denied often in our courts decisions are made by judges on very remote difficult legal or procedural grounds that are incomprehensible to the ordinary citizen As a result there is much criticism of judges and lawyers and a loss of faith in general in

the legal system for all its flaws i think the Athenian system was simple speedy open and very easily understood by its citizens it did contain provisions aimed at producing moderate penalties and at deterring unreasonable lawsuits it placed no barriers of legal technicalities or legal experts between the citizens and their laws counting as always on the Common sense of the ordinary Athenian now the Athenian democratic system as a whole brought to its height in the time of Pericles has been harshly criticized through the ages immediately by contemporaries who were hostile to the democracy and through the

centuries by people who have looked at Athenian history as it was depicted by the surviving authors and concluded harsh conclusions about democracy ancient writers directed most of their attacks Against the idea of government by mass meaning and the selection of public officials by allotment the Athenian renegade Alcibiades told a spartan audience as for democracy nothing new can be said about and acknowledged foolishness Plato has Socrates make the same point more fully and seriously Socrates observes that when it is a matter building a house or a ship the Athenian assembly listens only to experts if Someone

without expert qualifications tries to give advice in such things even if it is very handsome and rich and noble they refuse to listen to him instead they laugh and who dat him until either he is shouted down and withdraws of his own accord or the sergeant-at-arms dragged him off or he is expelled by order of the President so you just imagine that when you get up to speak in the Athenian assembly you better be ready for anything but when The discussion is about affairs of state says Socrates anyone can get up to speak carpenter tinker

cobbler passenger ship owner rich and poor noble and commoner and nobody rebukes him as they did in the earlier case for trying to give advice when he has no knowledge and has not been taught now in fact the Athenians did appreciate the importance of knowledge skill talent and experience when they thought these things existed and could be used in the public interest So they did not a lot but elected military officers some treasurer's naval architects and managers of the water supply these are essentially questions of life and death or of the financial security of the

state apart from that they did not care much about expertise if they did not elect professors of political science or philosophers or lawyers to govern and judge them it was because they were skeptical that there is a useful expertise in these areas and That if it did exist it could safely and profitably be employed for the public good it is not clear to me anyway that the experience of the last twenty five hundred years has shown them to be wrong I don't know how many what percentage of the representatives and Senators in our Congress are

lawyers by training but whatever that figure is it's far too large I it's really extraordinary that we all sit still for that kind of thing Okay the kind of variety excuse me of profession that one can find in our society is absolutely not to be seen in our government institutions well the Athenians would never permit anything so undemocratic as that secondly it is most unlikely that many fools or in competence played a significant part in public affairs of course that's the flip side of rejecting expertise and experience you may end up with people who don't

know what they're talking About in any shape manner or form having influence well the Athenians knew that and they were worried about it and I think that they did so perhaps they that the the possibility of idiots fools jerks and other unworthy dominating the political decisions I don't think that it's clear that we are better off than they are in this respect I often remember William Buckley once said he would rather be ruled governed by the first 40 whatever he said 40 50 people In the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty I thought

we could all we could all agree with that maybe even the Yale faculty I think that it's we ought to think a little bit longer before we assume our system is the only way one can think about conducting a democracy but to get at the heavy Athenians cope with this problem these the assembly itself was a far less unwieldy or incompetent body than is generally assumed by its critics and That you might ordinarily think would be the case if you've got five six thousand people out there trying to make a decision think of this if

an Athenian citizen attended no more than half the minimum number of sessions held each year he would hear 20 sets of debates by the ablest people in the state chiefly elected officials or those who formerly had held elective office deleting politicians in all factions and a considerable number of experts on a Variety of subjects who would simply get up and express their views and these were true debates in which it was not possible to hold to prepared remarks and look at your what do they call these books that they use their policy books or whatever

they were real debate and the speakers had to respond extemporaneously too difficult questions and arguments from the opposition nor were there the irresponsible displays but serious controversies leading Immediately two votes that had important consequences for the auditors and their audiences now if you assume that each attendant at the Assembly had been listening to such discussions for an average of only ten years and many of them would have had a much longer stretch think of it think of it such experiences alone must have fashioned a remarkable body of voters probably I would argue more enlightened and

sophisticated than any comparable group In history apart from that every year 500 Athenians served on the council where every day they gained experience in the management of Athens affairs from the most trivial to the most serious producing bills that served as the basis for the debates and votes of the assembly so in any particular assembly thousands those attending perhaps a majority of them would have had that kind of training on the council in light of that Breadth of experience the notion that decisions were made by an ignorant multitude is simply not persuasive I'd like to

compare that situation was something that I think perhaps we can understand in the 19th century when people went to a concert of what we call classical music almost everybody in the audience was a musician of some kind with it before radio television recording systems if you wanted music you had to play it and so people Especially women but men to studied how to play various instruments and they could so they could read music and they could understand it in a way that only a participant can hardly anybody who goes to a concert today is in

that situation so Beethoven and Brahms and people like that wrote their compositions and played there and the orchestras and so on played there those compositions to people who were in a certain sense almost experts in any case very well Educated amateurs and it's in that's the analogy I would suggest that we're talking about that the professional politician so to speak insofar as they're worrying in Athens we're dealing with people who didn't just come in off the street and didn't know anything about it they were prepared by their life's experience to be a very very tough

audience indeed but that raises the question more debates in the assembly carried on by ordinary citizens Without the necessary special knowledge and capacity for informed advice the evidence I think suggests snot for there were impressive deterrence both formal and informal that would make an inexperienced ill-informed poorly educated man reluctant to speak up in the assembly or the council even to begin with i would suggest another analogy for you for the many many years I have attended meetings of faculties at great American universities what i have seen is that very few and generally the same few

are bold enough to speak for or against some not very controversial policy argued in a group of fewer than a hundred people not to mention those rare larger meetings when subjects arousing passions are at issue now the people we're talking about these faculty meetings have extraordinary education they are alleged to have unusual intellectual ability and they belong to A profession where public speaking is part of the trade the meetings are conducted in the decorum of established rules of order that forbid interruptions and personal attack if a guy wants to say that man is a goddamn

liar somebody will call him to account and say that was a violation of personal privilege and he should cut it out that's not the way it happened in the Athenian assembly and yet even at these very very genteel faculty meetings i'm talking about those Who attend them speak very rarely if ever why why what is it that they turns them I ask you for instance you you all know the answer but you won't speak on it why why are you afraid to answer that question you know the answer thank you that's exactly the reason people

really are afraid of that they're just afraid that even if nobody even tells them that they're stupid just the way they react may make them feel as though they are stupid this is a fantastic deterrent and If we don't understand that we will not understand the way the Athenian assembly work because that was a mate but of course you know perfectly well their problem was much greater meetings of the Athenian assembly were not quiet seemly occasions we should not forget what DK opolis said in Aristophanes plays sitting there on the nixies he threatened to shout

to interrupt to abuse the speakers we shouldn't affect forget Plato's report Of how the Athenians laughed and hooted or shouted down speakers who lack what they thought was the necessary expertise now these informal deterrence alone I believe sharply limited the number of speakers in the assembly but there was also a formal device that encouraged them to take thought before they intervene and to be careful in what they said in these debates on the panang time perhaps during the career of Pericles but certainly not more than fifteen Years after his death the Athenians introduced a procedure

called the graph a paranormal that had the effect of making the citizens in the assembly the guardians of the Constitution any citizen could object to a proposal made in the council or in the assembly simply by asserting that it contradicted an existing law that assertion said stopped action on the proposal or suspended its enactment if it had already been passed the proposer was then taken before a Popular court and if the jury decided against him his proposal was disallowed and he was fined three findings that a person had done this deprived him of his rights

as a citizen the expectation of the assembly and its procedures formal and informal made it most unlikely that ignorance in competence played a very significant role in its deliberations of course there are some ignorant imbeciles who nothing will deter but that's true of our system to an even graver charge Has been leveled through the ages against the kind of democracy promoted by Pericles it is said to be inherently unstable inviting action and class warfare it is said to be careless of the rights of property and to result in the rule of the poor these rather

the poor who other majority over the rich minority these arguments weigh very heavily in the thinking of the founding fathers of the American Constitution who rejected democracy you Need to be aware of that their notion of what democracy was was Athenian democracy as described by its critics and they consciously and plainly rejected democracy they thought something else they thought they were creating a popular republic and by republic they meant something different from democracy starting with the fuller democracy instituted by Ephialtes and Pericles in fact we discover an almost unbroken orderly regime that lasted for 140

years twice it was interrupted by oligarchic episodes the first resulted from a coup d'etat in the midst of a long and difficult war the government of that oligarchy lasted just four months the second was imposed by the Spartans and after they won the Peloponnesian War that one lasted less than a year on each occasion the full democracy was restored without turmoil without class warfare without killings or exiles of revenge without confiscating the property of Anybody through many years of hard warfare military defeat foreign occupation and oligarchic agitation the Athenian democracy he persisted and showed an

restraint and a moderation rarely equaled by any regime now this behavior is all the more remarkable in light of the political and constitutional conditions that prevailed in the Periclean democracy and thereafter remember that the mass of Athenians were not faced with the power Of what has been called a military-industrial complex they were not supported by the complexities of representative government by checks and balances by the machinations of unscrupulous lobbyists or manipulated by the irresistible deceptions of mass media they had only to walk up to the pics on assembly day make speeches and vote in order

to bring about the most radical social and economic changes they could if they had wanted to they could Have abolished debt which presumably would be something the poor would favor they could Institute confiscatory taxation of the rich in the to the advantage of the poor the simple expropriation of the wealthy few all of these things they simply could have done nothing would have stopped them but they never did although political equality that is to say equality before the law that was a fundamental principle of democracy but economic equality had no Place in the actions of

Pericles on the contrary the democracy he led defended the right of private property had made no effort to change its unequal distributions the oath taken by jurors each time that they sat on a jury included the following clause I will not allow private debts to be cancelled nor lands or houses belonging to Athenian citizens to be redistributed in addition the chief magistrate each year swore that whatever anyone owns before I enter This office he will have and hold the same until I leave it the Athenians respect for property and their refusal to insist on economic

equality go a long way towards explaining why their democracy was so peaceful so stable and so durable but why were the majority of citizens so restrained and moderate part of the answer lies in the relatively broad distribution of property in 5th century Athens was by no means equal i Use the i want to emphasize the word relatively compared to states that were oligarchical e or Arastoo cratic and also in its growing prosperity through the greater part of that time it's very hard to sustain any kind of a reasonable moderate regime in times that are hard

and times in which there is great poverty so that was these were certainly among the reasons why Athens was so successful but there was always he should remember me a group of fabulously Wealthy citizens and also thousands who were poor by any standard it certainly seems clear that at any time in this period the majority of Athenian citizens were not rich enough to be hoplites not rich enough even to have those small family farms that supported your infantrymen so it's not as though there aren't a lot of poor people in the state the poorest moreover

those who lack the property to qualify as infantryman with the very men who rode the ships that Brought Athens wealth and power and glory the last 30 years of the century furthermore with terrible times of war plague impoverishment and defeat yet neither during or after the war did the Athenian masses interfere in any way with private property or seek economic leveling in the two ways that revolutionaries always want canceling debts and redistributing the land in the Periclean democracy the Athenian citizens demanded only equality Before the law I think that is the key principle to understand

when you're thinking about Athenian democracy full political rights for all citizens and that is what separated the Athenian democracy from oligarchies and aristocracies and other Greek States and the kind of even chance that is provided by these two things equality before the law and participation in the political process for all citizens by these rules the Athenian was willing to abide in the Face of the greatest disasters and the greatest temptations mm-hmm it was this politically equal individualistic law abiding and tolerant understanding of the democracy that Pericles had done so much to create and to which

he could appeal and point with pride confident that his fellow citizens shared his views in their rational secular worldly approach to life in their commitment to political freedom and to the autonomous importance of the individual in a Constitutional republican and democratic public life the Athenians of Pericles day were closer to the dominant ideas and values of our own era than any culture that has appeared to the world since antiquity that is why Paraclete Periclean Athens I believe has so much meaning for us but if there is much to learn from the similarities does at least

as much to learn from the differences between the Athenians and ourselves although the Athenians valued Wealth and material goods as we do they regarded economic life and Status both as less noble and less important than participation and distinction in public service to the community they were pioneers in recognizing the importance autonomy and legitimate claims of the individual they could not imagine the fulfillment of the individuals spiritual needs apart from his involvement in the life of a well-ordered political community to Understand the achievement of Pericles and his contemporaries we thus need to be aware of these

significant differences I think we ought to also study them with a certain humility for in spite of their antiquity the ancient Athenians may have known and believed things we have either forgotten or never known and we ought to keep open the possibility that in some respects they might have been right about some of these things now what I've been talking About up to now is the workings of the Athenian Constitution for active citizens and I remind you that means free men adults who have citizen parents that excludes a lot of people who lived in Athens

and so I'd like to spend a little time also talking about two groups of such people who were excluded from the political process women and slaves both of which have caught the attention of modern scholars eager to demonstrate the undemocratic aspects of Ancient Athens when judged by our criteria which seemed more and more to require that every living creature I was going to say every living thing be treated with equality I know that of course there are feelings people who want to say that we all say we all agree there should be no discrimination between

men and women there of course should be no slaves but now we're moving towards saying that people should receive a citizenship or citizen rights Who aren't even legally citizens there are many people who want to give protections to animals that now are limited to people and there are people also who want to include trees and other vegetation under these protections so we need to examine the Athenian situation and make our judgments about that let's talk about women first Greek society like most cultures throughout history was dominated by men this was true of the Democratic city

of Athens in the Great days of Pericles no less than in other Greek cities nevertheless the position of women in classical Athens has been the subject of a great deal of controversy the bulk of the evidence coming from the law the actual laws of athens from philosophical and moral writings and from information about the conditions of daily life and the organization of society shows that women were excluded from most public aspects of I should most aspects of public life They could not vote they could not take part in the political assemblies they could not hold

public office or take any direct part in politics male citizens of all classes had these public responsibilities and opportunities the same sources show that in the private aspects of life women were always under the control of a male guardian a father at first a husband later or failing these an appropriate male relative designated by the law women married Young usually between the ages of 12 and 18 I think if we think of them as being about 15 years old will probably have a reasonable average husband's on the other hand were typically at least 30 and

usually over it when they marry so that women were always in a relationship like that of a daughter to a father when you think about the realities of life marriages furthermore were arranged by the way as in other societies the higher you get in society The more likely it is that these marriages will be arranged with economic considerations social considerations predominating for dominating as you get lower in society I can I can only suspect because we don't really have evidence that it was far more informal and maybe that marriages may have been as a consequence

of the mutual desire then was true for the upper classes normally these am shifting again to where we have evidence and that means Probably not the poorest women in the city the women normally had no choice of their husband the woman's dowry and diaries were required was controlled by a male relative divorce was very difficult for a woman to obtain for she needed the approval of a male relative who if he gave that approval had then to be willing to serve as her guardian after the dissolution of her marriage in case of divorced the dowry

would be returned with the woman but it was still To be controlled in that case by her father or the appropriate male relative me excuse me the main function and responsibilities of a respectable Athenian woman of a citizen family was to produce male heirs for the household of her husband if however her father's household lacked a male heir the daughter became what the greeks called an epic Claro's the heiress to the family property in that case she was required by law to marry the man who was The next of kin to her father's on her

father's side in order to produce the desired male offspring in the Athenian way of thinking women were lent by one household to another for purposes of bearing and raising a male heir to continue the existence of the Oikos the family establishment because the pure and legitimate lineage of the offspring was important women were carefully segregated from man outside the family and were confined to the women's Quarters even in the house men might seek sexual gratification in several ways outside the house with prostitutes of high or low style prostitutes frequently recruited from abroad but respectable women

stayed home to raise the children cook weave cloth and oversee the management of the household the only public function of women was an important one in the various rituals and festivals of the state religion and there is a very new book by a professor At NYU by the name of Connolly which studies very carefully all the information that we know about ancient Greek priestess's at which reveals I think something that we haven't known enough about before that women in that realm at least had an enormously important and i would say sort of glorious role in

that way it doesn't change any of the things I've said about the other aspects of life but we we have had we've really not paid enough Attention to this religious side of things and we should remember that religion was very important for these people even though to us it looks as though they were very secular in the way they lived religion in their way of thinking was very important so anyway apart from these religious things atheneum women works affected to remain home quiet and unnoticed Pericles told the widows and mothers of the Athenian men who

died in The first year of the Peloponnesian War only this you know you will either have read or you will read Pericles famous funeral oration and he has all these things to say and at the very end he addresses the widows and the mothers of the men who have died in a way that it puzzles me beyond belief and I still don't understand why he chose to say what he did but what he said I think was the common wisdom about what the situation was he said your great glory Is not to fall short of

your natural character and the greatest glory of women is to be least talked about by men whether for good or ill okay I that's what they thought why the hell did he say it at the end of that funeral oration if anybody has any insight on that I would be very grateful if you would tell me about it not now or at any time in the future the picture derived from these sources is largely accurate but I would argue that it does not fit In well with what we learn from the evidence of a wholly

different set of sources first of all what we see in the pictorial art chiefly on vase in vase paintings and even more strikingly i think in what we learned from the tragedies and the comedies that were performed every year at two great festivals in athens and finally these things are derived very much from the mythology which is after all their religious tradition of the Athenians now These sources often show women as central characters and powerful figures in both the public and the private spheres the Clytemnestra who shows up in East glow tragedy Agamemnon Xie ranges

the murder of her royal husband and establishes the tyranny of her lover whom she dominates then there is the terrifying and powerful Medea of Euripides who negotiates with kings and can commit horrible deeds in her fury which I think Your ripa d suggests is very justified fury even if the deed is not so we are and these are just too two examples of which there are many in which women are central and important and powerful and active and not passive and it's all about them we are left with an apparent contradiction clearly revealed by a

famous speech in Europe ADIZ tragedy Medea and I'd like to read you that he presented his play at the Dionysiac festival in Athens his heroin Medea is a Foreign woman who has unusual powers I mean she is practically something like a witch a sorceress don't imagine these Halloween kind of witches a proper which is so beautiful that she can be which you think of that so she's a farm one with these powers but in the speech that follows she describes the fate of women in terms that appear to give an accurate account of the condition

of women in 5th century BC Athens here's what she says of all things which are living in can Form a judgment we women are the most unfortunate creatures firstly with an excess of wealth it is required for us to buy a husband and take for our bodies a master for not to take one is even worse and now the question is serious whether we take a good or bad one for there is no easy escape through a woman nor can she say no to her marriage she arrives among new modes of behavior and manners and

she needs prophetic power unless she Has learned at home how best to manage him who shares the bed with her and if we work out all this well and carefully and the husband lives with us and lightly bears his yoke this life is enviable if not I'd rather die a man when he's tired of the company of his home goes out of the house and puts an end to his boredom and turns to a friend or companion of his own age but we are forced to keep our eyes on one alone what they say of

us is that we have a Peaceful time living at home while they do the fighting in war how wrong they are I would very much rather stand three times in the front of battle than to bear one child I wonder what the Athenian men in that audience thought about all of that the picture that Medea paints of women subjected to men Accords well of course with much of the evidence but we have to take note of the fact that the woman who complains of women's lot is the powerful central figure in a Tragedy that is

named after her by the way it's not the only case another of the great tragedies of attic drama is Sophocles Antigone and then dignity is another heroic woman who defies kings and everybody else in order to do the right thing and it accepts death rather than to give way in her principles this is not the kind of a woman that Pericles had in mind when he said just shut up and be sure nobody is talking about you now this tragedy was produced we need to Remember at state expense before most of the Athenian population and

was written by a man who was one of Athens greatest poets and dramatists he is a cause of terror to the audience and at the same time an object of their pity and sympathy as a victim of injustice she is anything but the creature least talked about by men whether for good or for bad when those men walked out of that theater they would be talking about Medea for the Next week there is reason to believe that the role played by Athenian women may have been more complex than their legal status might suggest and that's

all I feel I can say about that subject because I haven't been able to resolve the contradiction most I yeah I mean well I won't i won't go into modern scholarly arguments but let me just say that no matter what they all say no matter how they come out this dichotomy is there it's in the sources we need to Do some thinking in some supplying for things that are missing if we ought to comprehend how both halves of this can be true as I'm sure they both are somehow let's turn next to the question of

slavery in Greece chattel slavery proper began to increase about 500 BC and it remained an important element in society the main sources of slaves were war captives and the captives of pirates who made a living in large part by catching people and selling them as Slaves and of course those people at first enslaved through war piracy or other means who were sold by slave traders they did not unlike in the American South were they successful or unnecessarily did they try to breed slaves themselves they would typically bought from slave traders like the Chinese the Egyptians

and almost every other civilized people in the ancient world the Greeks regarded foreigners as inferiors they call them barbarians Because they uttered words that sounded to the Greeks like bar bar bar bar bar and most slaves working for the Greeks were foreigners weeks sometimes enslaved Greeks but typically not to serve in the Greek home as a servant or even in that really not so much at home they did use slaves as I've told you earlier to work on the farms alongside the farmers the chief occupation as always before the 20th century was agriculture the great

majority of Greek farmers work these Small holdings too poor to support even one slave some would be so fortunate as to have as many as one or two slaves to work alongside them I think as I said earlier I think probably most of the hoplites could manage that but I think we don't we really don't know the answer to that I'm sure they range from zero to more than two but if you're thinking one or two you're probably right the upper classes had larger farms of course that would be let out to free tenant farmers

Or worked by slaves generally under an overseer who was himself a slave large landowners generally did not have one single great estate in every way I want you to try to get out of your head the picture of slavery in the American South with its plantations and great squads of slaves in one place under one master that it was not the typical way for the Greeks but rather the wealthy would have several smaller farms scattered about the polis well that arrangement did not Encourage the amassing of these great hordes of agricultural slaves who would later

work the cotton and sugar plantations of the new world slaves were used in larger numbers in what i laughingly call industry in the ancient world i mean handicrafts but one exception to that typical system was mining we know something about them mine's in southern Athens where the silver was found and that reveals a different picture nikki is a wealthy Athenian of the 5th century BC owned a thousand slaves whom he rented to a mining contractor for a profit but this is actually this is unique we don't know of anything like this besides this situation and

it's by far the largest number of slaves that we know any individual help in another instance of large slave holdings in Athens a family of resident aliens employed about a hundred and twenty slaves in their shield factory that was the military Industrial complex in Athens most manufacturing however was at very small scale with shops using one or two or a handful of slaves slaves worked as craftsmen in almost every trade and it was true for the agricultural slaves on small farms they worked alongside their masters if you took these slaves that I regard as taking

care of the majority of the work in Athens if you transfer lated them into being handy men or regular workers who worked at jobs regularly who Were free you would if you went in you wouldn't into these shops that's what you would think because you didn't have somebody lashing anybody over great numbers of people you would have two or three guys working there one would be the guy who owns it and every other two guys would be slaves a significant proportion of slaves of course were domestic servants and many were shepherds publicly held slaves also

served as policemen don't get carried Away there were very very few policemen they were also prison attendants there were very very few prisons and very few prisoners they were clerks and there were secretaries and some of them worked their way up because of their natural skills whether if they were in work this was usually the case if you found such people in commerce and most especially in banking we hear that one of the richest men in Athens in the 4th century was a man Called Bayesian who had been a slave and by his talents had

bought his own freedom and had then become one of the richest men in Athens that's an oddball story don't take that as being very widespread but it shows you one element in the system the number of slaves in ancient Greece is a subject of continuing controversy and that's because we don't have the kind of evidence to come to a conclusive answer there are no useful figures for the Absolute number of slaves or for their percentage of the free population in any city except Athens there the evidence permits estimates for the slave population in the Classical

period by which I mean the fifth and the fourth centuries that range from a low of twenty thousand slaves to a high of about a hundred thousand slaves if we accept the mean between these extremes I love to do that when I don't have any better thing to do you come up with Sixty thousand slaves now the estimates that are made about the free population of Athens in the same period of his height some people would say as low as not nobody gets much below forty thousand households someone to move it up towards about sixty

thousand households what do I come up with right fifty thousand that would yield a figure of fewer than two slaves per family it has been estimated that only a quarter to a third of free Athenians owned any Slaves at all so the distribution was aunt was unequal with most families having no slaves and some families having many some historians have noted that in the American South in the period before the Civil War where slaves also made up less than a third of the total population and three-quarters of tree southerners had no slaves the proportion of

slaves to free citizens was similar to that in ancient Athens because slavery was so Important to the economy of the south these historians suggest it may have been equally important and similarly oppressive in ancient Athens I find several problems with this analogy for one thing it's important to make a distinction between a world such as the cotton states of the American South was a civil war where a single cash crop well suited for exploitation by large groups of slaves dominates the economy and a society like the one in Athens Where the economy was mixed the

crops varied the land and its distribution very poorly suited to massive slavery another major difference is in the likelihood of a slave achieving freedom the freeing of American slaves although it happened was comparatively rare but in Greece it was very common the most famous example I've told you already about pays yoona began as a bank clerk earned his freedom became Athens riches banker and then was even rewarded with Athenian citizenship but that's very rare on the other hand the acquisition of freedom by slaves was not people frequently free their slaves on their own death and

often before that for various reasons it's also important to distinguish the American South where the slaves were distinguished from their masters by skin color we're thus masters were increasingly hostile to the idea of freeing slaves and in terror of slave rebellions with a very different Society Of classical Athens their slaves walk the streets with such ease as to offend noblemen who were class-conscious Plato complained about the Athenian democracy that men and women who have been sold are no less free than their purchasers and an anonymous writer of the 5th century was appalled by the behavior

of slaves in Athens he says one may not strike them there nor will a slave step aside for you and if it were legal for a free man to strike a slave an athenian Would often have been struck under the mistaken impression that he was a slave for the clothing of the common people there is no way superior to that of the slaves and the resident aliens nor is their appearance they allow slaves there to live in luxury and some of them in considerable magnificence in a state relying on naval power it is inevitable that

slaves must work for hire so that we may take profits from what they are well there are rich slaves it is no Longer profitable from my slave to be afraid of you in Sparta my slave would be afraid of you but there in Athens if your slave is afraid of me he will probably spend some of his own money to free himself from danger this then is why in the matter of free speech we have put slaves and free men on equal terms now a lot of this is absolute baloney this is some right-wing character

who is just so annoyed with Athenian democracy that he is making over-the-top Statements but it cannot be so far removed from reality as to be ridiculous or else it wouldn't be in any way persuasive so I think we have to imagine slaves moved about Athens with a degree of ease and security and as as he write he must rightly be saying you really couldn't tell a slave from a free man very readily in ancient Athens that's all of this is meant to be by contrast with the picture of the south even more remarkable the Athenians

were On occasion willing to contemplate the liberation of all their slaves in 406 their city facing defeat in the Peloponnesian War they freed all slaves of military age and granted citizenship to those who rode the ships that won the battle of argan Uzi twice more at crucial moments similar proposals were made although without success now during the Civil War people did suggest to the South that they liberate their slaves and enroll them in the southern army and Such ideas were always quashed and I think we can read something very important into the difference between the

two situations the southern southerners were afraid to do it because they didn't trust it the slaves not to turn on them and kill them if they were armed the Athenians just didn't have that fear at all and I think that's a big story about the difference between the two systems ok that's all I have to say about these subjects we do have six Seven eight minutes I'd be delighted to respond to any comments or questions and if you would like to put about any of these topics yes did not fear this later because I think

in the first place they they did not treat them so harshly as to create that kind of absolute hatred that nothing could take care of second of all I think because the prospect of their liberation being not an out of the question idea soften the edge between master and slave to a degree where the Athenians didn't have that sense these people are waiting to kill me I guess another thing is since so many of them first of all you start with household slaves well even in the South there were very very few household slaves who

did not develop friendly and warm feelings toward the people in the house so that takes care of another situation and then there are all these slaves who worked side by side with their master not as part of a Gang under an overseer but as a fellow worker with their farmers so the whole way of thinking about it I think was so different that and we never hear and here's another thing we never hear of a slave rebellion among the police of Athens we do hear of hell lock rebellions of course it doesn't fit the mode

in in Sparta but we never hear of a slave rebellion in spite of all the troubles these towns and so I think those would be the reasons anything else I guess well what when they had skills and this happened in the south too by the way just not to the same extent when they had skills it was in the Masters interest to encourage them to do their work to the best of their ability and so they rewarded them by letting them keep part of the profits of what they produced and that it was that of

course which allowed some of these people to buy their own freedom and it is true that that happened in the south as well Anything else yes matter there it sits the answer is I'm sure there must have been runaway slaves but it's just a non-issue so far as we can see you know it's the big deal in the south and the North when Fugitive Slave laws become a great source of trouble but I think there was not too much running away of slaves because there really wasn't any place to run to there was no place

where there wasn't slavery so if an Athenian slave runs to be OSHA he's going to be a Be oceans life I think that was one of the reasons and they put that together with the rather gentle arrangements I've described the combination i think reduced the problem of runaway slaves anything else ah yes the Spartan situation is compared to the Athenian situation night and day the helots I've told you all about it you read all about it and as a man leading the rebellion in the part at the beginning of the 4th century said about Helots

and other people who were knots party eights in enlasa demon they would have gladly eaten the spartans raw so that's there it is that's all you need to know about the difference yes too badly yeah I don't know how does the British system work did they do that I've told this story to various American lawyers and law professors and I've been struck by their absolute lack of imagination but but apart from when I finally got them to think about these Things they tell me some of them tell me very happily that in some areas we

are moving towards that all we have some of that they tell me that in civil cases very often the arrangement that they agree to is that one side will make one proposal the other will make another proposal and some arbiter will choose between the two but mostly if I speak to especially law professors I tried to get them to think about the advantages and disadvantages of the Athenian system With some objectivity and I and I say to them the put aside for the moment the question of whether you think justice is more likely to be

arrived at through the anglo-saxon system of law or the Athenian system of law because the truth is we don't know whether one way or the other and I found that they can't do it they're so committed to the conviction that justice is only possible under the anglo-saxon system of advocacy and competition and all of those things that They just won't think about it but you of course although three-quarters you're going to become anyway your ear above that you'll be much more judicious in thinking about that do I have to make an announcement yeah those of

you who were good enough to serve as hoplites in our demonstration it turns out we need for you to say it's ok for your pictures to appear on these deathless productions that we're engaged in that so would you If you could please come up forward and speak with John Lee and he'll talk to you about what has to happen thanks very much